Page 40 of By Any Means

“You think they didn’t know who you truly are.”

“I doubt it. The assailant didn’t mention me by name. He didn’t say anything at all.”

“You didn’t know him, either?”

“Lord, no. I barely saw him, to be honest. Before I ran.” Too busy fighting back, Laurie imagined. “But I didn’t recognize him from that little bit, no.”

“He had no race, no accent? No particular bearing? No style of dress?”

Chary shook his head. “He was white, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think Italian. I don’t remember what he wore. Boots. A workingman’s.” He winced, either in memory or a kind of bizarre apology.

“You’d know the type,” Laurie taunted.

“As I’ve said, nobody on the factory floor should be able to connect me to Charles Edward Wright. I can practically promise it. I wouldn’t have lasted a day if so; it’s been more than a decade.”

So he’d said. Had it really? Laurie wondered if he’d known Irving Sawyer. He should ask Irving when he’d worked for Wright Glass and when he’d been let go by the Wrights for organizing.

“So, that rules ’em all right out. All your gaffers and runner boys.” More interesting was that Chary’s first instinct had been to clear them from guilt.

“It isn’t a job with high turnover. I’ve known all of those men for years. It seems a very long wait for murder, if class resentment was the motive.”

“But if it was another gaffer, or a boy, but he doesn’t know you’re the boss,” Laurie led him, or tried to, “then why want his fellow gaffer dead?” Maybe because you’re attending union meetings, labor spy?

But Chary wouldn’t be led. “If I knew, I’d surely tell you.”

Sure you would.

“The other men went missing at seemingly random intervals,” Chary said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah. I don’t have a reason for them to have been killed, either. I said that. Do you see anything connecting them?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

Chary stirred with the broad, shallow spoon. “No. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful to you.”

An echo of Tjofabier Raberding, with less smarm. But more lies? Or more truth?

Chary’s soup had to have been cold by now. He hadn’t taken a bite in at least five minutes.

Laurie stood. “Let’s get you on a train, Chary Wright, so you can go home and I can leave you be.”

11

LAURIE

New York offices of The Rational Appeal

Newspaper Row, Park Row, Manhattan

Not three hours since he’d seen Chary safely off at Grand Central, Laurie was in-office much later than his usual for a Friday, sitting before his typewriter, glaring grumpily at the left-justified, blank page.

No leads. No answers. No culprits. Only covered-up murders and blatant attempts aplenty.

Irving Sawyer, sure, had come through with the dead men’s names. Four journeymen had gone missing from Wright Glass in the past two years: little traces, fewer leads. One, Dmytro Tkachenko, had been Ukrainian; a second other, Wiktor Roczeń, Polish, neither of which languages Laurie spoke well enough to interview the families himself. He could’ve gotten a translator without any trouble, but that was assuming the families themselves to be traceable in the tangle that was the Lower East Side. They weren’t.

Two of the four journeymen, the ones Chary had known, were confirmably dead. James Delargy, an Irishman, also a suspected part-time gangster, had been incarcerated in Sing Sing before eventually hanging himself in his cell. Another, Samuel Border, a white-passing but one-eighths-Black man—this identified postmortem—had been kept briefly in the care of the police for theft before he’d been run over by a streetcar shortly after release.